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Don't feel bad that you blew your first interview. Unfortunately, software interviewing skills are orthogonal to software development skills, and the only time
by SoftwareMaven 12y ago
Don't feel bad that you blew your first interview. Unfortunately, software interviewing skills are orthogonal to software development skills, and the only time most people get experience with interviews is during the actual interviews (no pressure or anything! :).
As such, you should fully expect to completely blow your first 1/2 dozen interviews (this includes your first 1/2 dozen when changing jobs after a couple of years). Go in with the expectation that you are going to fail. That doesn't mean you shouldn't try, just that you expect to walk out with nothing more than an hour or five behind you. You'll find a couple things happen: first, the pressure to perform will be reduced, so you'll be more comfortable and confident answering questions; second, you'll be able to better analyze where you might have gone wrong on any given interview to perform better next time.
No matter how badly you failed that first interview, you are better off now for having done it and failed than not doing it at all. The same will be true for each future interview until you land that job you want.
- thedufer 12y agoI have to disagree with "orthogonal". That means that there is no relation whatsoever between dev skills and interviewing skills. This just can't be true. To set the bar really low - someone who has never programmed before will never pass a code screen, while someone who has clearly has a greater than 0 chance of passing. This doesn't show much correlation, but there's clearly _some_.
- SoftwareMaven 12y agoIf you want to be pedantic, sure, there is some small amount of correlation there. But in the real world, I've seen people pass coding interviews who were incapable of writing software and I've seen people fail coding interviews who I knew could code circles around the interviewers. But, as usual on a site like this, being a pedant is an absolute must.
- thedufer 12y agoI did not intend to be pedantic at all. The difference between little correlation and none is small on a number line but very large in meaning. If there was no correlation whatsoever, that would imply that pretty much every software company is behaving irrationally by wasting their time interviewing people - that is, simply hiring at random would be better. This obviously isn't the case.